Here to stay

Islam cannot be separated from everyday life in today's world

Mehru Jaffer  Vienna

What is there to say about Islam at a time when the religion seems to be in the eye of every storm, that the world must brave, from felling of New York's twin towers to the recent bomb attacks on Mumbai?

As a Muslim against every kind of violence but who is certainly not with George W. Bush in the US President's war against terror what I can say is that the gigantic collision rocking the world's boat is not about Islam, at all.

Islam is just another well-intentioned idea born in a concerned mind in an attempt to try and make life more meaningful.

The image of Islam, however, is now besmirched and associated with the action of hijackers, bombers, assassins and kidnappers and its message is said to be imposed upon us by gods. Islam seems to be at odds with people of all other faiths with many Muslims looking at especially Christianity as a monster with bloody hands that continues to practise imperialism. Christianity is held guilty of being the author of much anti-Islamic history too.

The western Christian world's sympathy for Zionism is interpreted in much of the Muslim world as crude hunger for yet more land of formerly Muslim homes.

Sarnath Banerjee, 34, author of Corridor, India's first graphic novel, who is visiting me here in Vienna, expresses concerns that are more personal. Just four months ago he married Bani Abidi, 35, a Pakistani artist and filmmaker.

The recent Mumbai bombings mean that he will probably be forced to spend more time begging with bureaucracy to provide his wife permission to travel, and to live in India. Why, he would like to know.

My home in New Delhi is now Bani's home. But try explaining that to the bureaucracy,” he says.

The increasingly negative image of Islam in the collective consciousness of the world worries Bani in a broader sense and she tries to explore this phenomenon all the time in her work with short films. Research has proved to Bani that most Muslim suicide bombers are not religious people. She found that even young, intelligent Palestinians are driven to the edge of such extreme desperation in the face of on-going hopelessness, homelessness and helplessness that they agree to give up on life.

“India and Pakistan share the same air, sky and waters and yet we, the people of the two countries, are forced to become the enemy of the other.” Why, she would like to know. Islam in its best decades practised a “true protocol of tolerance”. Today it is turned into a “fortress of fanaticism”.

Amin Maalouf, the celebrated Lebanese writer who fled war in his country to live in Paris since 1976, has repeatedly said that this has nothing to do with Islam but with people who have converted their religion into a fundamentalist movement. Maalouf feels that extreme movements are not the product of Islam but rather the signs of the times.  

What has fuelled fundamentalism is the breakdown of progressive projects not only in the Muslim world but worldwide. Here powerful influences like materialism, consumerism and secularism have revived religion. Here problems of the past continue to shelter anxieties about the future. The era of globalisation does unify but it also exposes the unfair divide between developed societies and the defeated ones.

Under such circumstances the appeal of moral absolutism and the authoritarian life style propagated by all conservative politics provides certainty in an uncertain world.   

What we are witnessing in this day and age is naked anger of the rest, against the West. The problem is a post-colonial fear lurking in the mind of most multicultural societies that find themselves crammed with contrasting social practices into small, shared spaces.